The Fizz
by Spinnerweb
Summary: Vario just wants the fizz in his soda to be stronger, but his experiment has unforeseen effects on his classmates.


If there was one thing you could say for certain about the cadets of Lanseal, it was that they loved their fizzy drinks, whether they were battling the heat of the Daws Desert or in need of a pick-me-up in the chill of the Leanbluff forest.

A pick-me-up was what Class G needed as they returned from an exhausting marathon in the frigid Diebal mountains. After 'thawing themselves out,' as Sofia grumpily put it while heading to the locker room, they crowded the store to buy soda for themselves. Then they headed to the courtyard together.

"Anisette, dude," Lotte began as she sat next to her on the edge of the fountain, "I'm sorry I abandoned you in the marathon, but it was 19 laps too many if I fell behind." The drill instructor had said that the stragglers in the marathon would have to run twenty laps around the drill ground next morning.

"I don't want to hear about it," muttered Anisette, concentrating on her bottle a little more than needed.

"You're going to have to do them anyway, now, Lotte," said Noel, sitting on Anisette's other side.

"Oh, yeah," said Lotte, looking crestfallen. The drill instructor had grown impatient three minutes after handing out the twenty-laps sentence for the last ten to finish the marathon, and had set a very tight time limit instead. No one except Avan, Zeri, Reiner, Franca and Helmut had made the time limit.

"Well, at least we're almost all in this together now," said Noel. "Thank goodness we don't have to run those laps till next morning. Isn't drinking too much of that bad for your singing voice, Anisette?"

"Not really, darling," said Anisette, looking a bit more cheerful. "Edy said it's all right."

Avan, who was sitting nearby, shuddered. "And Edy's own singing voice is..." his voice trailed off. Anisette looked annoyed again.

"Robert Tree of Graphyte Blimp drinks soda all the time too, then," she argued. "His voice is amazing."

"Ooh, Graphyte Blimp! That band with Jimmy Scroll on the guitar, right?" exclaimed Lotte, spilling her soda as she grabbed her camera with her free hand. "Dude, I love them! When they come to town after the war, I'll be the first to report it, with lots of pictures!"

"The Tumbling Rocks are better," said Sofia.

"I think they're both pretty similar," said Lotte, sensing an impending argument.

"The What are the real hep cats!" declared Vario, bouncing onto the scene. He held up his fizzy drink bottle. "What's with the soda these days, man? The fizz is so weak I can barely feel it."

"The manufacturers' machinery isn't maintained quite as well because of the war cutting down on their resources," explained Zeri. "They can't add enough carbon dioxide to the drinks under pressure to give it a high level of fizz."

This indictment was too intelligent for Vario to grasp at the moment; he compensated by draining his bottle in one and saying, "This isn't much more than flavoured water, cat. Dangit."

That night Vario couldn't sleep. He thought it was because the lack of fizz had failed to satisfy him. The truth was that he had downed too many fizzy drinks in order to make up for the lack of fizz and the caffeine was getting to him. The next morning, as he ran his twenty laps around the drill ground, Vario felt a fizzy bubble of an idea rising in his head. His brain was even wilder than usual (if possible) due to lack of sleep, so as soon as they had finished running their laps and were done cursing the drill instructor under their breath, he explained his plan to his two best friends: Pete and Joachim.

Phase One of their plan was buying three crates of fizzy drinks from the store and carrying them to the Chemistry lab (the store owner stared at them as they left).

Phase Two was ready to be put into action.

A beaker containing a slow-bubbling mixture over a small flame was placed on one of the tables. Nearby, in Zeri's neat handwriting, was a note: "Volatility test. Do not touch." Vario picked up the beaker and emptied it into a sink, then removed the flame and poured one of the fizzy drinks bottle into the beaker. Then he put four ice cubes in. This he did only because he thought fizzy drinks tasted that way, but coincidentally it also reduced the pressure in the beaker.

"OK, Pete, Joachim, I need you to bring me any chemical you can find whose name ends in... _oxide,_" said Vario dramatically, his one eye gleaming, remembering the conversation he'd had with Zeri the previous day.

"I think there are hundreds of those," said Joachim.

"Bring me one that looks good then, because I need it!" screamed Vario maniacally.

Joachim and Pete headed off. After a few minutes, Pete called, "What about this one?" and slid a can across the long table to Vario.

_Dinitrogen oxide_, the can read. In fine print, almost too fine to read (Vario missed it, anyway), it said: _Laughing Gas._

"Perfect," said Vario, and turned the can upside down over the beaker.

"Wait a minute, man," said Joachim. "Are you sure about this? With my luck we'll just end up blowing up the lab."

"Of course I'm sure!" said Vario, wrenching his arm away from Joachim's grip and opening the can. A greenish gas floated into the soda. At once it fizzed and bubbled madly.

"It's alive, it's alive!" screamed Vario, cackling and raising his arms above his head like a mad scientist.

"Let me try it, bro," said Pete, his love for fizzy drinks evident by the fact that he'd suddenly started calling Vario 'bro.' He poured a small amount of the soda into a test tube and gulped it down. A grin of absolute ecstasy spread over his face. Then all of a sudden he started giggling.

"Pete, are you OK, cat?" asked Vario, looking a little concerned.

"Of ... course I ... am," gasped Pete with some difficulty. "I'm just so ... ha ha ha ... _happy _it's worked."

Vario and Joachim immediately drank the rest of the soda in the beaker. Soon they were laughing like maniacs too. After about five minutes, they calmed down. They were no longer laughing at nothing in particular, but the slightest thing, whether it was funny or not, set them off laughing again.

"We've got to fizz up all these drinks and hand them out to everyone," said Vario. "They'll be so grateful I'll be able to pick any girl I want." He giggled at the idea and continued giggling.

"No you won't," said Pete at once, "but at least you'll become Squad G's official fizzer." It wasn't a particularly funny statement, but he and Joachim managed only five seconds of silence before bursting into raucous cackles.

x x x

Half an hour later, having successfully fizzed up all the bottles, they carried them to the courtyard and handed them out to everyone. Everyone marveled at how strong the fizz was.

"I haven't seen soda like this since the start of the war," said Alexis in her calm manner.

"Hey, where's Zeri? He shouldn't be missing this," asked Vario of Cosette.

"He's helping Professor Brixham sort through the result of all the tests this year, right up to the last one," she answered, bending the straw in her bottle between her thumb and forefinger.

Suddenly Aliasse let out a loud guffaw. "That was the one in which Avan got a negative ten!" she said, doubling over with laughter. "Professor Brixham took off ten points for... _illegibilly!"_

That set them all off laughing and the combined cackles of them all carried right to Class A's homeroom, where Juliana was discussing tactics with her squad for the simulated combat exercise they were to have with Class G that day. She frowned; the sound rattled the windows in their panes.

"They must be testing their tank," she said, thinking the loud noise came from Lavinia's tank. "Let's go over our strategy for taking down armoured vehicles then!" she ordered, taking her hands off the table on which there was a map of the drill grounds showing Class A's intended positions, and placing them on her shapely hips, not noticing that they were where all the male students were gazing.

The drill instructor yelled over the public announcement system: "Attention, maggots of Class G and Class A! Prep your squads for simulated combat and arrive at the drill grounds in fifteen minutes!"

Class G's students floated towards the locker rooms in quite good humour. Every now and then someone would chuckle, and that would set them all off laughing again.

The two squads, Class A and Class G, formed up in front of the drill instructor.

"Squad leaders, shake hands!" shouted the drill instructor, but when he blew his whistle, Class G's students merely fell about laughing and clutching one another. Class A's students looked on, astounded. The drill instructor was about to sentence them to a hundred laps around the drill ground when a giggling Anisette suddenly pointed her gun upside down at him.

"You, sir!" cackled she. "Stop whatever it is you're doing."

"Nel-" began the drill instructor, but Reiner cut across him.

"You must be a pirate spy!" guffawed Reiner, holding onto Helmut's shoulder to keep from collapsing; their laughter had made even his strong legs weak-kneed. "Why else would you have an eye patch? Pirate spy! Pirate spy!"

The others took up the chant. "Pirate spy! Pirate spy! ... "

"B-but Kraatz has an eye patch too!" spluttered the drill instructor.

"Vario is our _benefactor!"_ said Coleen. Behind her, Vario beamed but a shadow momentarily crossed Morris's face before he continued laughing.

The drill instructor ran to the faculty office as if the hounds of hell were at his heels. He shut the door to the staff room, where Zeri and Brixham were the only ones present (still sorting through old tests), and started hyperventilating.

"Mr. Rodriguez, what's wrong?" asked Professor Brixham, concerned to witness the hardy drill instructor on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

"Your class has gone INSANE!" screamed the drill instructor. "I'm not a pirate spy, I'm not a pirate spy..." And that was all they could get out of him after that. Zeri hurriedly thrust a glass of water into the drill instructor's trembling hand as he and Brixham rushed towards the drill grounds.

Class G was still laughing and hiccoughing while Class A's students were alternately standing there bemused or trying to calm them down when Zeri and Brixham arrived on the scene. Nichol broke free of Sofia, who even in her light-headed state was trying to flirt with him, and ran drunkenly at Zeri and Brixham, raising his rifle backwards with its barrel pointing towards him as he did so.

"NICHOL!"

Franca's shout suddenly filled the air and sobered everyone up. Franca was towering over Nichol, nobody laughing anymore. Taking a deep breath, she began one of her merciless dressing-downs:

"How DARE you try to point a gun at a teacher. .. Well, it was the other way around ... so you could have shot yourself! WHY are you always being such a danger to yourself? Why are you always worrying me?"

Nichol looked as if he wanted nothing more than to sink into the ground and never be found. Finding yourself the victim of a Franca-scolding was as horrifying a discovery as a farmer finding mad cow disease among his cattle, or a chocolate-maker finding maggots in his chocolates, or a man in the street finding a tapeworm in his gut.

They couldn't begin to imagine how hard life was for Nichol.

Now that they were no longer giggling their heads off, Zeri asked, "Why were you all laughing so hard?"

Vario stepped forward and, with everyone's eyes on him, began to explain. He was beginning to feel troubled over what he had done, but wanted to take responsibility to save the others from punishment. Pete and Joachim quietly came up to stand next to him. Real friends are very loyal.

When he was finished and Pete and Joachim said they had helped him knowing how dangerous it could be, Brixham said incredulously, "You added _laughing gas_ to soda?"

Zeri said furiously, "You _ruined_ my experiment?!"

Brixham hid his face in his hands and was quiet for a very long time. Finally, he mumbled, "What am I going to do with my class?" in a small voice and led the three of them to the Headmaster's office.

They were given three days' solitary. Class G's students (except Zeri) told them that they didn't hold anything against them; it had been fun while it lasted.

Even if their diaphragms hurt terribly for several days after that.

**A/N: Yay, finally another story. The idea for this story came to me in a very funny dream in September. While carbon monoxide would have been more realistic as the chemical inducing those effects, it's dangerous so I used laughing gas for the story because it's funnier, safer and just more charming.**

**The bands mentioned in the story represent real bands. Graphyte Blimp represents Led Zeppelin, my favourite band. The Tumbling Rocks represent the Rolling Stones, and the What represents The Who.**

**I hope you liked it.**


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